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Tough Nut Cones Isolation for loudspeakers, brilliant solution over spikes

I wanted to share with everyone an experience I had with trying to decide how to decouple my Arendal 1723 THX Monitors and their stands from the floor. 

Most of us know now that the days of thinking metal spikes were the best idea are over. It generates immense pounds per square inch of pressure into one point and all that energy is then transferred to the floor.... the last thing we want to do with speakers. Many mid-fi to high-end loudspeakers now ship with isolation footers/feet instead of spikes.
I happened across a FANTASTIC video from Jay's Iyagi:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32DrKCqLWkk&t=788s 
Immediately upon watching that video, based on measurements from Jay, I contacted Derrick at Tough Nut Cones in Canada. So for $170 per stand/speaker I bought the Medium Cones. Derrick and his wife were amazing to talk to and deal with. 
So I now have them installed.... the sound is truly brilliant. And the cones are just "pointy" enough that they work on both solid floors and carpeted floors (as I have) and they look really wicked under the stands.

audiotruth

Showing 2 responses by soix

soix
10,429 posts
 

@jrareform  In the link the OP provided the reviewer compared these to Gaia and subjectively preferred the Tough Nut footers in addition to them measuring better overall. 

soix
10,429 posts
 

Very interesting and thanks for sharing.  Love that these are so cost effective and I’ll definitely check these out at some point.  My understanding is that spikes are more for preventing vibrations from getting to the floor rather than providing isolation, and given their poor measured performance here this would seem to bear that out.  Isolation/damping sure makes a lot more sense to me and really makes me wonder why speaker manufacturers almost universally use spikes.  It would seem even budget isolation feet would be an improvement over spikes and would be a good question for a speaker manufacturer. 

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